Power outages in post-war Lebanon

This is pilot study exploring the socio-material practices for maintaining electrical services in homes in Lebanon. Power outages are endemic in Lebanon and in the last decades, the unreliability of electricity supply has become an inherent part of Lebanese everyday life, normalizing strategies for maintaining desired levels of convenience and comfort that cut across the social (e.g. changing routines and practices) and the material (e.g. purchasing uninterrupted power supply systems for computers and appliances). This research project will explore the impact of power shortages on everyday life in the city of Beirut, Lebanon, by focusing on the socio-material elements that comprise households’ responses to them.

Networks of actors and artefacts of electricity supply and demand traverse different scales of urban life, where the ‘stuff’ of power cuts which range from local private generator enterprises (PGEs) providing electricity for a monthly subscription, to household items such as rechargeable batteries or candles. These mundane elements are contrasted with the contested political arena that is the provision of reliable power for the country.

The principal aims of the project are to understand the social and material networks that make up everyday power supply for homes in urban Lebanon, examining how these networks have developed and how they differ over time and space. In doing so, the project will generate empirical knowledge about this dimension of daily life in the city and the coping strategies adopted by households in Beirut, as they try to reconcile their ordinary expectations and aspirations with the reality of power shortages in Lebanon.

The Paris Agreement on climate change and the carbon-reduction plans of many governments (including the UK) are unwittingly reliant on unproven technologies to suck hundreds of billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere.+

Professor Kevin Anderson at the University of Manchester and the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research has published an analysis of the ‘wildly over optimistic’ IPCC projections of future global warming.+

Tyndall Manchester is expanding its academic team to build energy research knowledge exchange opportunities, and to support teaching within areas of carbon accounting, energy policy and energy efficiency.

International shipping has to half its emissions says a new report by the Tyndall Centre at the University of Manchester, being presented today at a meeting of the International Maritime Organisation.+

The shipping industry expects ongoing growth in CO2 emissions to 2050, despite an apparent recent decline, say Tyndall Manchester experts. Opportunities for decarbonizing the sector in line with international commitments on climate change need to be re-evaluated.+

We today publish a new Working Paper and launch the Tyndall Travel Tracker App to the Tyndall Centre community. Our aim is to support the necessary transformation towards a professional low-carbon culture of work travel in climate change research. +